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I'm a little confused by who exactly some of these features are targeted to. Take the "computable history" bits, for example. None of it even begins to address

I'm a little confused by who exactly some of these features are targeted to. Take the "computable history" bits, for example. None of it even begins to address making computable data useful for academic historians that might have access to Mathematica licenses. It might be useful for fun factoids at trivia nights, but queries against the data sets are severely restricted in the cheap ways to access the language, so that can't be it either. Who's this for?

JZL003 2y ago
Yeah it's pretty sad because I can imagine if this database was made public it could be built upon and parsed for many languages. Presumably they paid multiple people to do all this work but it's so expensive for a casual user Wolfram on the cloud for free is good, especially for derivatives and simplification I use it a lot They tried with it free on raspberry pis but who's going to boot a pi to do academic work
yummypaint 2y ago
Yeah their built-in nuclear data, for instance, has never had sufficient citation info to use it for actual research, and it's unclear who would play with such information without having any possible interest in publishing. Mathematica seems to be a grab bag of whatever excites Wolfram recently. It was heavy on cellular automata a few years ago and now it has llm stuff. It is a nice environment for playing with computation and doing back of the envelope work, but in the end i always write python programs instead because it's just easier to work with real data that way and the mathematica licensing is a pain.
klysm 2y ago
I don’t think that’s how Mathematica is developed. The vision seems to mostly be trying to model and encode the world regardless of how useful it appears to be. Unfortunately the modelling approach that is employed probably isn’t that useful to people actually interested in the data.

JZL003 2y ago

Yeah it's pretty sad because I can imagine if this database was made public it could be built upon and parsed for many languages. Presumably they paid multiple people to do all this work but it's so expensive for a casual user Wolfram on the cloud for free is good, especially for derivatives and simplification I use it a lot They tried with it free on raspberry pis but who's going to boot a pi to do academic work

yummypaint 2y ago

Yeah their built-in nuclear data, for instance, has never had sufficient citation info to use it for actual research, and it's unclear who would play with such information without having any possible interest in publishing. Mathematica seems to be a grab bag of whatever excites Wolfram recently. It was heavy on cellular automata a few years ago and now it has llm stuff. It is a nice environment for playing with computation and doing back of the envelope work, but in the end i always write python programs instead because it's just easier to work with real data that way and the mathematica licensing is a pain.

klysm 2y ago

I don’t think that’s how Mathematica is developed. The vision seems to mostly be trying to model and encode the world regardless of how useful it appears to be. Unfortunately the modelling approach that is employed probably isn’t that useful to people actually interested in the data.